Append run time for each test to output. Uses Time::HiRes if available.

failures

Show test failures (this is a no-op if verbose is selected).

comments

Show test comments (this is a no-op if verbose is selected).

show_count

Update the running test count during testing.

normalize

Set to a true value to normalize the TAP that is emitted in verbose modes.

lib

Accepts a scalar value or array ref of scalar values indicating which paths to allowed libraries should be included if Perl tests are executed. Naturally, this only makes sense in the context of tests written in Perl.

switches

Accepts a scalar value or array ref of scalar values indicating which switches should be included if Perl tests are executed. Naturally, this only makes sense in the context of tests written in Perl.

test_args

A reference to an @INC style array of arguments to be passed to each test program.

test_args => ['foo', 'bar'],

if you want to pass different arguments to each test then you should pass a hash of arrays, keyed by the alias for each test:

test_args => {
my_test => ['foo', 'bar'],
other_test => ['baz'],
}

color

Attempt to produce color output.

exec

Typically, Perl tests are run through this. However, anything which spits out TAP is fine. You can use this argument to specify the name of the program (and optional switches) to run your tests with:

exec => ['/usr/bin/ruby', '-w']

You can also pass a subroutine reference in order to determine and return the proper program to run based on a given test script. The subroutine reference should expect the TAP::Harness object itself as the first argument, and the file name as the second argument. It should return an array reference containing the command to be run and including the test file name. It can also simply return undef, in which case TAP::Harness will fall back on executing the test script in Perl:

If set formatter must be an object that is capable of formatting the TAP output. See TAP::Formatter::Console for an example.

errors

If parse errors are found in the TAP output, a note of this will be made in the summary report. To see all of the parse errors, set this argument to true:

errors => 1

directives

If set to a true value, only test results with directives will be displayed. This overrides other settings such as verbose or failures.

ignore_exit

If set to a true value instruct TAP::Parser to ignore exit and wait status from test scripts.

jobs

The maximum number of parallel tests to run at any time. Which tests can be run in parallel is controlled by rules. The default is to run only one test at a time.

rules

A reference to a hash of rules that control which tests may be executed in parallel. If no rules are declared and CPAN::Meta::YAML is available, TAP::Harness attempts to load rules from a YAML file specified by the rulesfile parameter. If no rules file exists, the default is for all tests to be eligible to be run in parallel.

This specifies where to find a YAML file of test scheduling rules. If not provided, it looks for a default file to use. It first checks for a file given in the HARNESS_RULESFILE environment variable, then it checks for testrules.yml and then t/testrules.yml.

stdout

A filehandle for catching standard output.

trap

Attempt to print summary information if run is interrupted by SIGINT (Ctrl-C).

Accepts an array of @tests to be run. This should generally be the names of test files, but this is not required. Each element in @tests will be passed to TAP::Parser::new() as a source. See TAP::Parser for more information.

It is possible to provide aliases that will be displayed in place of the test name by supplying the test as a reference to an array containing [ $test, $alias ]:

Normally it is an error to attempt to run the same test twice. Aliases allow you to overcome this limitation by giving each run of the test a unique name.

Tests will be run in the order found.

If the environment variable PERL_TEST_HARNESS_DUMP_TAP is defined it should name a directory into which a copy of the raw TAP for each test will be written. TAP is written to files named for each test. Subdirectories will be created as needed.

Run the named tests and display a summary of result. Tests will be run in the order found.

Test results will be added to the supplied TAP::Parser::Aggregator. aggregate_tests may be called multiple times to run several sets of tests. Multiple Test::Harness instances may be used to pass results to a single aggregator so that different parts of a complex test suite may be run using different TAP::Harness settings. This is useful, for example, in the case where some tests should run in parallel but others are unsuitable for parallel execution.

Note that for simpler testing requirements it will often be possible to replace the above code with a single call to runtests.

Each element of the @tests array is either:

the source name of a test to run

a reference to a [ source name, display name ] array

In the case of a perl test suite, typically source names are simply the file names of the test scripts to run.

When you supply a separate display name it becomes possible to run a test more than once; the display name is effectively the alias by which the test is known inside the harness. The harness doesn't care if it runs the same test more than once when each invocation uses a different name.

Called by the harness when it needs to create a TAP::Parser::Scheduler. Override in a subclass to provide an alternative scheduler. make_scheduler is passed the list of tests that was passed to aggregate_tests.

TAP::Formatters handle TAP output. You can load custom formatters by using the formatter_class parameter to "new". To configure a formatter, you currently need to instantiate it outside of TAP::Harness and pass it in with the formatter parameter to "new". This may be addressed by adding a formatters parameter to "new" in the future.

To do this, you can either extend an existing TAP::Formatter, or write your own. Writing formatters are a bit more involved than writing a SourceHandler, as you'll need to understand the TAP::Parser API. A good place to start is by understanding how "aggregate_tests" works.

Custom formatters can be loaded configured using the formatter_class parameter to "new".

If you can't configure TAP::Harness to do exactly what you want, and writing a plugin isn't an option, consider extending it. It is designed to be (mostly) easy to subclass, though the cases when sub-classing is necessary should be few and far between.

If you like the prove utility and TAP::Parser but you want your own harness, all you need to do is write one and provide new and runtests methods. Then you can use the prove utility like so:

prove --harness My::Test::Harness

Note that while prove accepts a list of tests (or things to be tested), new has a fairly rich set of arguments. You'll probably want to read over this code carefully to see how all of them are being used.